CS 5964/6964: Interactive Machinima

Spring 2009

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Resources that you may find useful

Warning - DO NOT USE SPECIAL CHARACTERS (dots, underscores, dashes) in any file names. There are quirky problems in adobe premier, half-life 2, and other places. Just use letters and numbers!!!!!

Wiki

• Our wiki is here

Steam

• To get steam, go here
• Here are some hits on how to setup steam for making machinima

Starting Machinima Project

• Gang - I'm having problems with the starting machinima project.  When I run the new mod that I created and then try to play the web movie, it fails.  But when I run it just under HL2 it works.  There is something going on that I haven't figured out.  So, for this first assignment, just use the regular Source SDK, the HL2 game and you should be good to go.  The two maps are linked from the homework page and here: (web102.vmf and web102clean.vmf).  You should be able to put these maps any place that you like and when you do the run map in hammer it will copy it to the Half-Life 2 directory so it can be loaded into the game.  Note, do not forget to put -engine ep1 as a launch option in source sdk and -console in the launch option for hammer so you can do the map web102clean command to load your map (that is for when you load your map outside of the run map command).
• Machinima Half-Life 2 project with quicklaunch, source code, and initial maps and here are instructions on how to get things set up and started

Machinima

• Machinima.com (lots of useful links)
• Officer Dan sample (explains what Machinima is).
• Our machinima on Machinima.com
• Our machinima on youtube.com

Half-Life 2

• Steam
• Valve developer wiki
• Choreography link on Valve wiki

Hammer

• Noesis Interactive DVD teaching about how to use Hammer is installed on Lab6-1 in the EMCB 130 computer lab
• Building your first map
• General Level design
• Nem's Tools is a great source for useful tools for messing with Machinima.  In fact, consider:
  • GCFScape is a tool that lets you take apart the gcf files to extract models and textures
  • VTFEdit is a tool to let you import and export textures
• How to  remove a texture and change it and put it back tutorial from Impulse 101 team fall 06 semester is here - although it is much easier using gcfscape and vtfedit (we need to write a tutorial and get rid of this one).

Faceposer

• avi Video on how to use faceposer (part1 and part2) - I can't find where I found these, but we should put in a link there instead of to our local copy!!!
• Nice tutorial on how to make a faceposer scene
• As it says in the tutorial, you need to download and install the MS Speech SDK 5.1 which is here (note, this is already installed on the lab machines).  Also, the one that you need to install is the SpeechSDK51.exe (68.0 MB).  This has problems with Vista.
• Audacity is here
• Here is more stuff on the phoneme editor

Class Stuff

• Here are the gman briefcase files so it disappears (vmt and vtf).  Copy them into <steamdir>\steamapps\<accountname>\half-life 2episode 2\ep2\materials\models\Gman

• From James - if you want to eliminate the sound of footsteps, then you need this game_sounds_physics.txt file and this Blank.wav file. Place the text file in the scripts folder and the wave file goes into the sound folder.

Video

• How to make a video is here.

BOB - PLEASE UPDATE THIS WITH THE LATEST STUFF (including hints from last year's students, and better details about making movies with premier).

Hints from 2008 Students are here.